Real Estate #90674
1990
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
chromogenic print
Dimensions
image: 15.24 × 22.86 cm (6 × 9 in.) sheet: 20.32 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of David Knaus, in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Photography at the National Gallery of Art
Accession Number
2014.159.1.21
Art Historical Context
Henry Wessel's *Real Estate #90674 (1990) captures the artist's signature fascination with the American landscape transformed by human intervention. A key figure in the New Top movement of the 1970s, Wessel documented suburban sprawl, commercial signage, and everyday built environments with a cool, objective eye, revealing the poetry in the ordinary. This chromogenic print, part of his ongoing "Real Estate" series likely features a numbered sign amid vast, empty terrain—a stark emblem of property development in late-20th-century California, where Wessel lived and worked. The medium, a chromog...
About the Artist
Henry Wessel
Henry Wessel (1942–2018) was an American photographer celebrated for his spare, clear-eyed photographs of everyday life in the American West and beyond. Born in Teaneck, New Jersey, he studied at Pennsylvania State University and later at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he worked with the influential photographer Minor White. White's emphasis on photography as a medium of carefu...